


The Eyrie

by drinkbloodlikewine, whiskeyandspite



Category: Dominion (TV)
Genre: Cuddles, Fluff, History, M/M, Sibling Love, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 11:58:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4478519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drinkbloodlikewine/pseuds/drinkbloodlikewine, https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskeyandspite/pseuds/whiskeyandspite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“You can make your own storms,” Gabriel says, drawing a hand though Michael’s hair, tugging Uriel’s softly in passing before folding it behind her ear fondly. “You will. Hurricanes and tsunamis, earthquakes and floods. You will be unstoppable, little brother.”</i>
</p><p>What led up to the fight between the brothers in A Bitter Truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Eyrie

**Author's Note:**

> All the feels we cannot even o_____o

It storms when they are made, and Gabriel watches Raphael for what to do. She seems unperturbed, so he remains the same. Uriel doesn’t at all seem to be afraid of storms. But Michael…

Michael curls up at the back of the eyrie, small as he can make himself. His wings, still unpracticed in the motion and control, splay out atop himself and beneath, shielding him from whatever sounds shake his bones and pull him into himself in fear.

So Gabriel goes to him, ignoring Uriel’s prying and Raphael’s quiet gaze, and curls up beside his brother just the same.

“He’s angry.”

“Not at you.”

“He makes the world tremble with it, how are you unaffected?”

Gabriel just shifts closer, his own wings unfurling to cover them both, drawing Michael nearer despite his snarl of displeasure.

“I hear His voice, brother. These words are not for us.”

Michael’s wings move, subtle jerks beneath Gabriel’s own, in time with his heart. The tension in him is palpable, through feathers, through the shallow breath that whispers faint past his lips. He is the youngest of them, the newest to this and yet entirely familiar.

Gabriel sighs, glancing towards their sisters. Uriel wrinkles her nose at him, past Raphael’s shoulder. The elder sits reading, placid, as the younger works Raphael’s tenebrous hair, black as shadows, into plaits. Their eyrie is vast, palatial by earthly standards, but defying any such constraints of mortal architecture. When they need rooms, there are rooms. When they wish for stairs to scale, they spiral upward unending. If they need rest, spots of luminescence dapple endless dark; in waking, they are surrounded in sunlit gold and snow-bright marble.

Through the confluence of their desires - the three coherent, anyway - the room in which they sit now is half-scattered with cushions and places for rest, half-library of endless knowledge. Lightning crackles like sparks burst from a bonfire, twisting past them across the ceiling of sky overhead.

Another wheel-clatter of thunder pounds across the sky and Michael’s breath holds entirely until the thunder fades into the distance.

“Who are His words for, then?” Michael demands. “Why can’t I understand them?”

Gabriel curls his wing a little tighter, and whispers, “Will you let me in?”

It is grudging, though more from his own fear than from animosity, but slowly, Michael lifts his wing enough for Gabriel to slip beneath.

There is a brief awkward wriggling as they adjust their wings around each other, but when they settle they are close, in the curved protection of their vast wingspans, the sound of the storm muffled within. Just their breaths, their furtive shifting as Michael presses closer and Gabriel rests his arm heavy over his brother.

“Why?” Michael asks again, eyes deliberately on Gabriel’s chest, not meeting his. He has been as curious as Uriel, as studious as Raphael, as brave as Gabriel, but he, of all the siblings, is the most prone to empathy, the strongest link to the plans their Father has for them, though cruelly, he is not permitted to know them for himself.

Or perhaps the biggest cruelty is that Gabriel cannot tell him.

“His plans may have gone awry,” Gabriel replies. “Outside of us. He builds a world and like any living thing it fights to exist. Sometimes it fights Him.”

Michael’s eyes flare wide at the words, a slow blink briefly blocking their bright blue before he lifts them. His fingers curl against Gabriel’s chest, fingertips caught against the soft raiment when a whipcrack of thunder catches Michael’s voice in his throat. He swallows hard, and tucks his head beneath Gabriel’s chin, arm slipping over his middle.

“Why would they? If they know Him to be their Father, too, if they know Him to be the one who made them -”

He shivers as Gabriel’s hand soothes the tension from his spine, their wings interlocked as if to shield them from the outside world.

“Perhaps when He has punished them,” Michael reasons, “they will not be so defiant.”

Gabriel curls his fingers in the soft feathers that rest against Michael’s skin and soothes his shivering to trembling instead. He wishes he could tell him that defiance grows when punished, that those defying learn that what they do may displease, but it may not be wrong. He wishes he could explain this knowledge, knowing it has only been passed to him through a proxy, that he knows without knowing, knows without reason or experience.

“Because He gave them free will, and they are using it,” he says. Another peal of thunder draws Michael closer, pressed tight to his brother, eyes closed and hands curled tight in displeasure. Nearby, there are footsteps, and Gabriel sighs.

“An eyrie within an eyrie? Greedy boys.” Uriel gently pushes the toe of her boot against Gabriel’s back, enough to nudge. “Won’t you let me in?”

Michael’s smile appears, briefly, always especially pleased to garner Uriel’s peculiar attention, flighty as she is. But he meets Gabriel’s eyes first, and their twin gazes narrow.

“Sorry,” Gabriel says from beneath their feathery shelter. “Closed.”

Michael scarcely resists a snort of laughter, pressing the little sound against Gabriel’s throat.

“Don’t force me to pluck your wings bare to get in,” Uriel warns. “I’ll do it.”

“You’d only cut yourself,” Gabriel tells her.

“It would be worth it to see you that way.”

He can’t restrain his laugh this time, seeing Gabriel’s brow raise at the threat, and when the next crack of thunder snaps the heavens, Michael hardly notices it.

Still, Gabriel doesn’t move, not his wing from over them, not his body away from another petulant nudge from their sister. And then she kneels, fingers deliberate in parting the feathers on Gabriel’s wing until, relenting, he folds it down, glowering over his shoulder.

“There you are,” she grins. “The grumpiest angel in the eyrie.” She wriggles her fingers, showing off how they are not cut or bleeding, and Gabriel restrains himself from swatting her with his wing. “Now what were you boys on about?”

“Storms and defiance,” Michael replies, and Uriel graces him with a bright grin.

“The two things I know most about.”

“Do you?” Michael asks, lifting his head to look past them both when Raphael snorts.

“She doesn’t.”

“I might,” Uriel answers. “You don’t know that I don’t -”

“I do.”

Slowly, Gabriel begins to fold his wing back over Michael, but Uriel snares it with a laugh. “Don’t you disappear again,” she tells him. “Let me in.”

“Tell me what you know of storms,” Michael asks, rubbing his cheek against Gabriel’s own as his twin good-naturedly rolls his eyes.

Uriel’s lips press together in thought, a bolt of wild flaxen hair curled around her finger. “I know that they bring all the elements together - fire in the clouds, rain thickening to a flood, wind to gust against the earth and cast it towards the sky. I know that humans are awestruck by them.”

She shifts only enough to slip a leg across Gabriel’s hip and sit heavy on him, ignoring his grunt, before she executes a languid turn and lowers herself to lay on the bed of their wings, squeezed between both her brothers. Turning her eyes to Michael, she runs her knuckles fondly down his cheek.

“I know they can’t hurt us. He wouldn’t let them.”

“Then why must we feel them?” Michael asks.

“Because they share our sky,” Uriel shrugs. “I suppose. Raphael, do you like storms?”

Outside, lightning flashes and nestled in the pillows where Uriel had left her, hair coiled into elaborate knots and beautiful braiding, their sister shrugs.

“Yes.”

“Verbose, that one.” Uriel nods, turning to look at Michael again. “There is nothing to fear of them. Just sound, bright flashes. We are far more powerful than a mere storm, Michael, we are _angels_.”

“You can make your own storms,” Gabriel adds, drawing a hand though Michael’s hair, tugging Uriel’s softly in passing before folding it behind her ear fondly. “You will. Hurricanes and tsunamis, earthquakes and floods. You will be unstoppable, little brother.”

Michael sets a leg across his sister’s, limbs twining together, her arm over him, his over both, Gabriel’s fingers in his hair and finally a dark wing from his twin, wrapped around the three. Raphael makes a sound, beyond, a gentle amusement, and her soft sandaled footsteps come closer to sit nearer to them.

Michael watches Uriel a moment more in disbelief, but the slight displeasure in his brother’s expression belies the truth in her words. With this, finally, he eases, imagining thunderclaps from his wings and lightning flashing along the blade of a sword. Only Gabriel’s fingers stir him again from the brief reverie of rainfall washing clean the world, and Michael tilts his cheek into his brother’s hand as Uriel curls snug against him.

“I would,” he decides, “for our Father. It is unwise to move against Him, to defy His wishes. He will not need to summon storms, then, with me to teach them their errors.”

Uriel turns to look over her shoulder, then, at Gabriel, eyes up at Raphael behind him, but she says nothing, she turns back against her little brother, their youngest and most loved.

“No, little brother,” Gabriel sighs, closing his eyes and resting against the earth. “You will be the storm He summons.”

\---

The first time Gabriel tries to reason with Michael, both filthy with dust and blood, both humming with energy from a battle well-fought, he is struck for his kindness. A swat of a wing, sharp in reprimand, and narrowed eyes as though Michael sees not the misstep in his actions. Gabriel could hardly care for the strike, he has felt worse and fallen harder, but he aches for his sibling in the eyrie, wings unsure and unpracticed, flexing as he stood at the mouth of their home and contemplated flight. He misses his brother who would crawl to sleep against him, wings folded lazily behind him.

“Michael, hear me.” 

“I have heard enough from you,” Michael answers. His fingers flex, precariously close to the hilt of his blade, but he resists reaching for it.

Yet.

“You simper,” he says, dust rising around sandaled feet as he stalks closer. “You beg for mercy as if you were a mere mortal, grovelling. They defy our Father with their idols, they burn incense and sacrifice to false gods -”

“And they have been punished,” Gabriel says, before spitting rough against the sand. His blood gathers dry there, and he sinks his fingers into the earth as if to rise, stopping only as Michael’s form casts a shadow from above him. “Would you kill children who know not what they do? You have lain waste to their parents already.”

“I do as our Father asks of me, no more than that. Those children will grow to defy His will with even greater venom. Better to salt the earth than to let weeds grow again where they have already been razed.”

“They are His children too, Michael.”

“And they defy Him!”

He is stunning in his grace, Michael. Strong and radiant, powerful and frightening. Six wings spread wide and blocking out the sun, a cosmic horror, beyond even that. Gabriel loves him. He loves every aspect of what his brother is but he can feel him slipping, when he is tasked with such destruction, such brutality and being mercilessly indiscriminate. 

“You seek to hurt, you care not whom,” Gabriel says, pushing himself to sit on his heels, then up, to stand before his brother again. “And when that hunger is sated -”

“Do not, brother, you overstep.”

“- you will come to me and you will weep for the innocence you have taken, when you were tasked with removing only sin.”

Michael’s lip curls, teeth clenched and bared in a stark whiteness against the blood that seems to coat him head to toe. He steps to Gabriel, fearless, and snares the collar of his tunic in his fist. For a moment, Gabriel expects to feel his brother nuzzling beneath his chin, a warm whisper tucked against his throat asking to be wrapped in his wings.

“He left the discretion to me, Gabriel, to smite defiance from the cities that spit in His face.”

A phantom sensation, all too brief, before the back of Michael’s fist connects with Gabriel’s face hard enough to drive him to the ground once more.

“If you do not stand with me,” he snarls, “then you stand against me. Think carefully about your choice, brother.”

\---

The sand does not give beneath Michael’s knees when he is driven to it, the fine grains scalding his palms. He swallows the blood that pools in his mouth and takes a breath, two, wings heaving with the weight of the air that fills his lungs before he moves to grasp his blade and finds his wrist held and pinned behind his back.

“Uriel,” Michael warns, thunderous, “this is not your fight.”

His voice is that which has foretold cataclysm, time and again, filling rivers with blood and leaving fields and cities fallow of anything that might hope to exist within it. The very earth quakes beneath him from the trembling of thousands when he moves; the heavens rend for him. Uriel jerks his wrist higher up his back and Michael levels his gaze on Gabriel before him.

“It comes to this,” Michael whispers, the rushing water of the Flood spilling through his words. “You choose them over your own brother. Over your _Father_.”

“You do not see what you have become, Michael,” Gabriel tells him, words gentle again, for now, despite how roughly Uriel holds their brother down, despite how little patience she has left for him. Usually so playful, so easy to forgive, Uriel’s teeth are bared and red, her eyes narrowed, fire within burning almost cold with its intensity.

“You are no longer a weapon but a broken device, an angry thing. You kill and then you destroy, when you were not told to, you drive yourself to a point where -”

“And _you_?” Michael hisses. “Standing back to let me, _brother_. You are no soldier. You are a voice that is rarely heeded.”

Gabriel swallows. He thinks of the eyrie. He thinks of early mornings tangled between his siblings, Michael always pressing closest. He thinks of late nights and cold nights and the discoveries their bodies have made together, in these forms. He thinks of the fear, the uncertainty that fills Michael’s eyes once the ravaging is done, once the blood begins to flake from his fingers.

“Then I shall speak a language you understand,” he sighs, and draws back his hand to strike his brother across the face.

It is not a cry of pain that carries across Babylon’s barren sands, but a laugh. Deep and resonant, until Michael’s mouth fills with blood and he spits it at his brother’s feet. Bruises form, shadows cast by one of the only beings in existence that could make them darken his skin. His body trembles, shoulder jutting cruelly beneath his skin as Uriel holds him at the breaking point.

“He will punish you for this,” Michael whispers, words slurred behind the swelling of his split lower lip. “You think that He will love you more for it. Envious, spiteful creature -”

The next blow is enough to level him, and Uriel releases his wrist just in time to stop his shoulder from snapping. Michael trembles against the sand, his eyes aflame as he looks to her in turn.

“Heed us,” she pleads, jaw clenched. “We have never wronged you, Michael, we have never -”

“Until now.”

“Even now,” she insists, wings snapping against the air as she shoves a foot into his side to turn him to his back. “We would not move against you if we didn’t know. It was a test, Michael, if we let you go now -”

“Uriel,” Gabriel interrupts, in his voice a warning that she ignores, focused entirely on Michael.

“He would destroy you Himself.”

A laugh snaps from Michael as he reaches for his blade again.

It is kicked away, quick enough before Uriel can take it to use. Gabriel grasps her hand pulling her close to remind her to leave him mostly unharmed. She cares little, but she listens enough for this. Her next blow dents Michael’s breastplate and drives the air from him, and then it is impossible to tell who strikes, but strike they do, both.

Michael fights as the weapon he was created to be. He spreads his wings and throws his fists, quick to twist from a hold or a press but never quick enough to escape them both. Every new blow brings him closer to the earth, soil smearing over his nostrils as he tries to drive himself up from it again.

He curses and he yells, he takes his beating and fights back but little by little his cries stop being mirthful, they turn to younger things, little and keening. They become the sounds of Gabriel’s brother afraid, still, of storms, despite being their Father’s most powerful. And only then does Gabriel push Uriel away. She takes to the air quickly, too hungry for the slaughter to trust herself to stay, and seeks their sister.

Gabriel stays.

His first soft touch against Michael’s brow pulls forth a sob, lips parted, red spit clinging in lines between his teeth as he tries to draw a breath, eyes closed and hands seeking for his brother.

“Oh, Michael.”

The sword is dulled, the flood stymied. Michael grasps Gabriel’s tunic with blind fingers, eyes blackened near to shut from the beating laid upon him by his siblings. For his own good, Gabriel tells himself, to save him from a righteous reckoning, but he can hardly believe the words themselves when Michael’s breath hitches.

Even still, he fights, choking down the helpless moan that rends itself from him.

Gabriel grasps Michael’s arms and pulls him close as he sits back on the sand. Michael clutches to him and drags himself nearer still, into Gabriel’s lap. With his wings tucked away, he seems so small, as the day he was made from the cataclysm of a storm. Gasping soft, wet sobs against Gabriel’s throat, Michael weeps.

Destroyer of nations, ravager of worlds. Destruction incarnate, whose name would be cursed by those smote were they not a smear of scarlet in his wake.

The effort to form words is enough to nearly rend Michael asunder.

“Don’t leave me here,” he begs. “Don’t go.”

"Never," Gabriel whispers, holding his twin close, stroking over his damaged back and bruised arms, even as he slowly heals himself from the attack.

He could not leave him if he tried. 

Like canvas snapping in the wind, Gabriel’s wings unfurl wide and large, one set, another, until all three are spread and curl slowly around them both. Just as in the eyrie, centuries before. Always keeping his brother safe.

"You are a stubborn creature," Gabriel whispers to him, hands gentle In Michael's blood and sweat matted hair. "We both are. Headstrong and uncontrollable. You are a force, Michael. But heed me, brother, please, let me be your voice of reason when all reason leaves you."

Michael trembles against him and Gabriel sighs his name softly. He draws his thumb over Michael’s brow and shifts to rest them both on their sides in the sand, outside of a city of dead and dying.

"We are one, little brother, a wheel within a wheel, always turning," Gabriel whispers, holding Michael tight against him. "We work together. We cannot be, apart."

He speaks in the voice of their Father, who made them so. Joined in thought and mind, paired in the movements of their hearts, their beings stitched from the same celestial cloth, for one to tear away would mean the slow suffering end of their other. His words are prophecy and promise, warning and reminder.

“Why would He? If He made them to be His children, too, if He made me to do his bidding -”

Gabriel shakes his head, and rests his cheek against Michael’s brow. The younger cries out low, aching and agonized, the sound buried painful against Gabriel’s chest until it fades to breath whispering soft as sand.

“I am only the messenger,” Gabriel reminds him, rocking Michael gently, stroking his back with feathers and fingers. “It is Raphael’s place to understand Him, not ours.”

“You have defied Him by telling me that this was His test.”

“There has been enough blood shed,” he says, cradling Michael’s face in his hands to bring their eyes together. “I will not see yours spilled only to ease His paranoia.”

Michael turns his cheek into Gabriel’s hand and murmurs, “You spilt it for Him.”

“Not all of it,” Gabriel protests, smile widening as he watches Michael’s face restore itself to wholeness. “Just enough.”

With a sigh of laughter, rough in his throat, Michael slips his arms around his big brother’s middle. Beneath the shelter of Gabriel’s wings, they kiss, forgiveness shared and reassurance yielded, worship and praise laid bare before the other. How much like broken Babylon they are.

Gabriel kisses the wounds from Michael's skin, each press of lips healing and soothing him. He turns as Michael turns him, parts his lips to the aching need of the kiss that is pushed against his mouth.

He can never deny his brother, he can never not love him. And when another night befalls them, Gabriel will whisper of it as they rest together, shielded and safe. He will not see Michael fall so hard and cruelly once more.

Defiance, blatant and inescapable. Punishment reminding only that what he does may displease, but it may not be wrong.

\---

Violence becomes their language on the battlefield and after it. The anger Gabriel refuses to let be taken out on innocents he takes upon himself. He does not fight back as Michael rains blows upon him, with fists and feet and wings. He shudders when the blows become caresses, the cruel words soft apologies.

And once in a while the violence manifests in other ways, just as brutal and just as welcome. Pinned to the blood-soaked earth beneath his brother, Gabriel allows him to assume victory, allows him to think himself the conqueror. 

But he never bends for his brother. And he never will.

With struggle of wings and filthy earth gouged out by flight feathers, Gabriel pins Michael in turn, hand against his throat, seated on Michael’s stomach. He says only _there you are_ , and leans to press their lips together brutally, claiming his brother as his own again. Michael’s savage snarl relents only when Gabriel does not give him purchase to turn away; he relents in his body’s roiling turmoil when Gabriel will not be unseated. Held in place by the only being beside their Father to whom Michael is capable of submitting, he yields, inch by battle-hardened inch.

His tongue plunges into Gabriel’s mouth, splitting his cut lips, smearing holy blood between their mouths. Hands made rough from centuries of war catch Gabriel by his hair and pull enough that Gabriel drives his knee into Michael’s side to force him to release. When Michael does, his expression is caught between pain and pleasure.

He laughs like lightning, sharp and sudden.

Michael does not wield words like his brother does; he speaks no poetry but that of his body, a perfect weapon crafted by God for perfect destruction. Gabriel wonders, as he forces Michael’s wrists to the ground, held firm beneath his own, if Michael would destroy himself were he so instructed. The thought chills him. He knows the answer.

“It is done, little brother,” Gabriel tells him. “Ashkelon lies in desolation, its people massacred. A place of weeds and salt pits, a wasteland forever. It is _done_.”

His words, always Gabriel’s words and the warmth of his voice, pull the heaving of Michael’s body away from violence towards others and towards himself instead. He lunges to taste the freedom of Gabriel’s words again, and a desperate sound aches from Michael as forgiveness spreads his brother’s lips across his own.

It is done and they were good, obedient and worthy and permitted to have their peace. Gabriel presses his forehead to Michael’s, pushing him back down to the ground and panting warm air between them. Eyes barely open, Michael watches him, shifts to clasp his fingers together as Gabriel lets one of his wrists go to run his knuckles up the inside of Michael’s strong thigh.

He does not hesitate in his touch, grasping enough to pull a keening sound from his twin, pressing his lips to Michael’s to taste it before tugging his bottom lip between his teeth.

“You are a proof of life to me,” Gabriel murmurs, stroking Michael harder, feeling the leather skirt he wears ruck up against his wrist. “Destruction, creation, they feed from each other, like a snake eating its own tail, continuous and flawless.”

Another kiss, rough, claiming, and Gabriel lets him go, watches the way Michael spreads his legs and draws his knees up for him, arches his neck to seek more sweet words that drip like honey into him. His own proof of life within his brother, in turn.

There is little more prelude to their rough joining, spread across the packed earth of their shared tent. There is little more needed with so much blood spilled, mingled hot with tears thick enough to salt the earth barren. There is little more they need than to know the work is done, and for Gabriel to give Michael the forgiveness and peace he always needs so desperately after.

Michael’s voice breaks in a cry, not of wrath but of a wonderful weakness, pain and passion twined inextricable for only Gabriel’s ears, for only Gabriel could draw such a sound from him. He arches as Gabriel fills him, their breastplates scraping steel against steel, and Michael watches through hooded eyes near-black with widened pupils as Gabriel’s wings fan all-encompassing above him.

He surrounds Gabriel as Gabriel so often surrounds him, in his first-born fear of storms through untold centuries of regret following Michael’s reckonings. He wraps his long legs around Gabriel’s hips, arms around his neck. Beneath his jaw Michael kisses fluttering, helpless things as Gabriel pushes from him breath and tears both.

They join and join again, wings tangling in a black canopy over them both, mouths leaving smears of spit and blood against their skin. The roughness becomes softness through panting breaths and low hums of pleasure. Michael eases his wings to the ground, submissive, surrendering, and Gabriel lays atop him, preening them clean, fingers careful and attentive, lips soft where they press to powerful muscles and warm feathers.

It will always be this way, perhaps, time and again, easing the pain of their battles with hands and words meant only for the other. Perhaps it always will be Gabriel soothing the storm Michael becomes.

\---

“Feeling better?”

The beating is minor, considering, hardly any blood drawn, but unsurprising with Michael’s foolish determination to remain anything but what he was made to be. Gabriel watches him, his fist raised and his teeth bared and yet none of the fire in his eyes that made him so formidable a Flood, once.

Once.

He would thank God for that, were He around to hear him.

Michael’s breath finds him again, and slowly his fingers unfurl. He lets his hands drop to his side, nearly dizzy with the rush of contact too long unfelt. His fist against Gabriel’s face, his gaze set against his twin, the sudden synchronicity of shared hearts that find his easing in time with Gabriel’s own, always steady. Their meetings, frantic and vicious, have grown further and further apart. Months have passed since the last time Michael laid eyes on his brother.

Months have passed since the last gentle thought that pressed itself into his own and called for him to come.

He ignored it then, but seeing Gabriel kneeling before him now, patient beneath the brutal blows that Michael lays against him, Michael wonders how he ever imagined such a thing as distance sustainable between them. His knees too find the ground. He sits and holds out his hand for the flask that Gabriel removes from his pocket.

“Given over to mortal indulgences, little brother?”

Michael snorts and snatches the liquor away, uncapping it to take a pull. His nose wrinkles and he sighs through his nose, brows knitted from the burn of it.

“More than we might ever have imagined,” Michael admits. His eyes squeeze shut and he grimaces, drawing up his knees to lay his arms across. “Are you certain?”

Gabriel sighs, shifting to set himself into the same position as Michael has chosen. He thinks of how delighted his brother had been when he figured he could balance back on his wings, and would sprawl in all sorts of languid positions, testing his own strength in the eyrie.

“I haven’t the connection with her I have with you,” he admits. “I could not have felt her death as I felt your sacrifice. A lingering feeling, perhaps, an instinct to trust.” He shrugs, reaches for the flask and holds it a moment before tilting his head back to drink.

“Raphael would know.”

“I’ve not heard from her in -” Gabriel considers, shrugging. “- decades now.”

“Neither,” Michael answers. “But if it’s true - if Uriel is -”

“She would have come to seek us out. Perhaps. Or not. She’d just as readily cloister herself deeper in the firmament as she would beat us with one of her books.”

Michael nearly laughs, but cannot bring himself to make the sound. He accepts the bourbon when it’s offered back to him and thumbs across the mouth of it, still warm from his brother’s lips. It is unfathomable, unbelievable in a way that can only be the remnants of a faith long since crumbled, leaving little but ruins behind.

“Do you remember -”

“Yes,” answers Gabriel, and he takes back the flask once Michael has sipped again.

They can still feel her squeezed between them, teasing both, wrapped in the sanctuary of her brothers’ wings. Her wars were no less bloody than their own, smears of cadmium red and fortissimo crescendos, spreading their Father’s name through countless rebellions and reformations of the arts. Michael wondered, often, at her affection for the mortals and their crafts. He realized all too late that her battles would win more to faith in Him than any of the plagues that Michael let loose as punishment.

For long moments they are quiet, settled by the tree that covers them in soft shade, the grass that offers little more than tickling reeds within it. They remember, they consider, and it is Michael who moves first, to stand, and Gabriel who watches him.

“We fought side by side, once,” Michael murmurs, and Gabriel merely lifts the flask to his lips, waiting. “Despite our differences.”

“Perhaps because of them,” Gabriel suggests, smiling when Michael levels a gaze on him that would make others tremble. He is sweet in nature, truly, a pup baring his teeth to an older dog when he faces his siblings.

Gabriel loves no one more.

“In truth, we should join forces not for us, for neither of us would admit to bending for the other.” Gabriel pushes himself to stand, closes the flask and pockets it once more. “But for her. As two aspects of her most primal nature.”

Michael regards him, then lets his gaze slide over the landscape. Memories for them are not as mortal memories are, they are an archive, collective and shared, accessed at will and clear as the moment they were made. He thinks of Uriel prying Gabriel’s feathers open to see them both, curled up against the storm; he thinks of her grin in asking what they were discussing.

“Storms and defiance,” he murmurs, and he can feel Gabriel smile without even having to see him.

“The two things she knew most about.” Gabriel steps closer, just enough to be within reach, and holds out his hand. And with thoughts of the first storm and the comfort of his siblings, the softness of their words and playfulness in their acceptance, Michael takes it.


End file.
